When Ma Bell Ruled

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

For last week’s issue,  I needed to find the correct spelling of the name of the little store up the street from my East Clinton Street home. Since I do not have access to the Madison County library I had to find an alternate source I could find on the internet. I searched for the “Huntsville phone book white pages” and was directed to the Library of Congress website and the white pages I needed to research.

The page I was directed to was a collection of Huntsville phone books from 1952 to 1962. I was surprised that such a collection even existed; even more so that it was so easy to find. After I found the address I was searching for, I decided to look up my family entries in the years available. Not only was I able to find the phone numbers of the houses in which I lived, I was also able to see the street address of the same houses.

With the phone books loaded onto my screen, I took the liberty of searching some of the entries about the phone system, and found a few interesting things. Here are a few of the tidbits of information that was printed in the 1952 phone book. Our phone was not a dial phone at the time. We had to tell the operator the number we wished to call.

I was able to find the Redstone Park address of my family in 1952, when I started to school at Farley. I don’t really understand some of the calling instructions for the phone we had. Our number is listed as “2395-R-2”. I have no clue what the “-R-2” stood for.

Read on and educate yourself on how to use a phone in 1952. Members of the class of 1964 would have been about six years old at the time.

Those are just a few of the additional information I found in the 1952 White Pages Telephone Book. There are others, and I will continue this thread next week.

The Wayback Machine

Here is a chart of costs of long distant calls from Huntsville to other cities in 1952. If you take the cost to call Birmingham back then, the $.70 would be $8.29 in today's money.

I plan to continue to share some telephone directory stories next week, looking back at what we had to put up with back then.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, And Comments

Skip Cook, LHS "64, "The "small grocery store" in the Lakewood area was Bentley's Superette.  Craig Bannecke and I used to scour the ditches for soft drink bottles (2 cents each) to have enough cash to buy a Coke and peanuts."